Building the Onlnie Risk Training Niche – Part I
Last week of February 2011 we quitely celebrated the first full year of Finance Training Courses (aka Learning Corporate Finance). A business initially conceived of 11 years ago that spawned a book, the startup crash course and a suprising rebirth selling online risk courses covering video based quant training as well as pdf versions of self paced risk course notes. For those of you who have just joined us here is the original timeline.
May 2001 – Avicena goes under – The original business for selling corporate finance and derivative pricing training online
Jan 2003 – Alchemy takes its first breath as a consulting business
2004 – 2007 – Alchemy risk and pricing consulting and training practice takes off
May 2007 – First conversation with Abbas about doing risk and pricing training online
Aug 2009 – Second conversation with Adnan about quant training online
22nd Feb 2010 – Learning Corporate Finance site is up
Sep 2010 – Learning Corporate Finance picks up the Runners up slot in PASHA ICT Awards 2010
Nov 2010 – Finance Training Course is the new redirected domain for the online training business.
Dec 2010 – Content Sale and Advertising revenues cross 400 US dollars a month.
26th Feb 2011 – 54,000 visitors, 124,000 page views, 15 plus new orders a month. Break under 250K in Alexa ranking and sub 500K in Quantcast rankings.
March 2011 – Finance Training Videos is here with the Quant Crash Course and Understanding N(d1)
Finance Training Course – 10,000 visitors and 24,000 pageviews a month, end February 2011. Over 60% growth in traffic and pageviews in 4 months.
Learning Corporate Finance – 6,000 visitors and 15,000 page views a month, mid October 2010. A surge in traffic that starts in end June 2010 levels off in November 2010 as we move domains. Traffic triples in the 4 months starting July and ending October.
But it is not traffic that is up at Finance Training Videos. Pages per visit, bounce rate, ratio of repeat visitors and average time on the site have all picked up in March compared to the October statistics.
1st March 2011 numbers
End October, 2011 numbers
How ever the most impressive change is where the traffic is originating from after the redirect went into effect. Pre Redirect, the top ten cities contributing traffic to Finance Training Courses were:
The top ten cities in the most recent six weeks show Karachi slipping to the number 3 slot and Lahore and Islamabad knocked out by Dubai and Manila.
Even more importantly 33% of the traffic for the site now originates from the US, 8% from India and United Kingdom, only 6% from Pakistan and the rest divided between Asia Pacific and Middle East.
To be continued…